USS Wisconsin: A Drone Surrender, 'Temper, Temper' and a Kentucky Bow

USS Wisconsin, BB-64, was an Iowa-class battleship authorized in 1938 and commissioned in April 1944, the highest-numbered U.S. battleship ever built. She was 887 feet long, displaced over 57,000 tons fully loaded, carried nine 16-inch guns and made 32.5 knots from eight boilers and four geared turbines producing 212,000 shaft horsepower. That speed let her escort fast carriers, and in late 1944 she screened Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet. Typhoon Cobra in December 1944 sank three destroyers, while Wisconsin reported no structural damage and two injured sailors. In July 1945 she shelled Japan's home islands, and one raid of over 1,000 shells cut a copper plant's output from 40,000 to 1,500 tons a month. Mothballed in 1948, she was recommissioned in 1951 for Korea, where she served for a time as Seventh Fleet flagship.

Off Songjin in March 1952 a North Korean 155 mm battery scored her first combat hit, injuring three sailors, and she answered with a full nine-gun salvo. In May 1956 she collided with the destroyer USS Eaton in fog off the Virginia Capes, and a 68-foot, 120-ton bow from the unfinished USS Kentucky was grafted on in 16 days. Decommissioned in 1958, she returned in the 1980s with Tomahawk and Harpoon launchers, Phalanx guns and RQ-2 Pioneer drones. In Desert Storm she served as Tomahawk strike commander and fired 24 Tomahawks in the first two days. Off Faylaka Island in February 1991, Iraqi troops waved white flags at her spotter drone, the first recorded surrender to an unmanned aircraft. She was decommissioned that September and now sits at Nauticus in Norfolk.

• Her propellers were each roughly the size of a two-story house, and the Bureau of Ships thought she might reach 34 knots running light.
• After her nine-gun reply off Songjin, the escorting destroyer USS Buck signaled two words: temper, temper.
• Her 1958 decommissioning left the U.S. Navy with no active battleship for the first time since 1895.
• The Pioneer drones, loud like a two-stroke engine, were flown low on purpose so Iraqi troops would hear them after the Missouri's bombardment.
• The 2006 National Defense Authorization Act required her to be kept ready for reactivation even as a museum, until the Navy fully transferred her to Norfolk in 2009.